The graduate student experience at McGill

Tag: back to school

Landing at the Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport for the first time is an emotional moment for an international student: You are landing in the country where you will hopefully spend the years that will follow and you see for the first time how Canada looks like. At the same time you are tired from the… Read More That half-déjà vu feeling

September is just around the corner and that can only mean one thing: the start of a new school year. So welcome back to the ‘ever-so rested’ returning grads and a huge warm welcome to new McGill graduate students! To celebrate, or not, depending on how you feel about the dreaded ‘rentrée des classes’, here… Read More What Made You Go To Grad School ?

The human potential is simply remarkable. When human go against each other they can create things like war. They can create the terrible circumstances that were the subjects of a few posts last week. But when humans work together, they can create wonders. At the Macdonald Campus, we created something of a small wonder this… Read More The wonders that humans are capable of

And so, gradually, comes the change in season. Flipflops are slowly — stubbornly almost –relinquishing themselves to boots, red and orange leaves are falling and fluttering about, and the light has changed. There is a definite, unmistakable autumn glow, and the old buildings on campus look like they are showing off a different face now,… Read More That crisp autumn air and the promise of a fresh year ahead

There is something contagious about the frenzy that is “back to school.” And when I say contagious, I mean it in a germy, plague-like, I-don’t-know-where-I-caught-it kind of way. It’s frantic and stressful and every year it manages to derail the carefully planned timeline I have for progressing through my program. I should clarify that for… Read More On liminality… and what feels like the longest rite of passage. Ever.

“I was so wasted…”, she said, rolling her eyes as she recounted how she doesn’t remember stumbling home and dragging herself out of bed for the French language placement test at nine o’clock in the morning. I smiled, trying to picture her pains and remembering those days gone by. The corridor was filled with (mainly)… Read More Welcome to McGill!